The Whistlers

Chapter 2: Prologue, Part 2

1903

Work at the eventual site of the Mexico City airport unearths a statue of the Aztec sacrificial goddess Coatlicue (Ko-at-LEE-quay), "She of the Serpent Skirt." Considering it too hideous to be viewed, the authorities of the day order it quickly reburied.

1913/1914

Still hale at 71, American journalist and occult writer Ambrose Bierce leads a large, armed-to-the-teeth expedition into the state of Chihuahua during the Mexican Civil War. No convincing explanation has ever been given for its mission or its complete disappearance. The eventual discoverer of the most famous Crystal Skull - British author and explorer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges - is in Mexico at the time, and his record of encountering Bierce late in 1914 is the last credible clue to his fate.

1914

Remembered as Adolph Hitler's evil tutor, Karl Hausofer was the son of Germany's ambassador to Mexico. There he receives some exposure to Native tradition and access to a powerful psychotropic drug presumed today to have been peyote. Hitler's experiences with this drug and Hausofer's geopolitical theories would go on to play a large part in the development of the Third Reich.

1915

Roycroft founder Elbert Hubbard is lost and presumed dead after the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. His reasons for journeying to Europe during the rage of World War I remain mysterious. While Hubbard vows that his purpose is to meet Kaiser Wilhelm II and stop the war, rumor holds to this day that his true purpose was a secret synod with a Rosicrucian society ready to surface after being underground for over a century. Later the same year the world's most prominent Rosicrucian society reforms under the acronym AMORC ("The Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross").

1916

With five American divisions poised in support at the Texas border, General John Pershing leads a 12,000 man foray into Mexico. A search for Pancho Villa is the official explanation, but the rebel is hard to miss at the time, and many believe that Pershing must have been after something else.

1924

At the Maya site of Lubantuun in Belize, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges uncovers the most impressive of the known Crystal Skulls, the so-called "Skull of Doom," with its detachable lower jaw made from the same block of quartz crystal. Currently on semi-permanent display in Chesterton, Indiana, the Mitchell-Hedges Skull is lifelike enough to be reconstructed into the face of a woman of likely Polynesian ancestry.

1926-present

The man whom Stephen King calls, "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale," H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) develops a unique motif in macabre fantasy based on "the Great Old Ones," a pseudomythological pantheon of demonic, extra-terrestrial beings at work behind the world's most sinister evils. Presuming it nothing more than fantasy, Lovecraft and the writers of his circle - like Robert Bloch, Algernon Blackwood, August Derleth, Fritz Lieber, and "Conan the Barbarian" creator Robert E. Howard - gleefully perpetuate "the Lovecraft Mythos," [also called, "the Cthulhu Mythos," so named for Cthulhu (Ka-THOO-loo), its chief demon]. In the 1930s, though, Lovecraft is astonished to start receiving fan letters from a loner in Buffalo, NY, pronouncing him a prophet. A night watchman and amateur antiquarian, William Lumley (1880-1940) insists to Lovecraft that he has struck truth with his themes of occult orders, pre-human cities, power-icons, and the dreaded return of the Great Old Ones. Lumley has seen the signs, he writes, in Western New York, which may even host a portal to that horrid other realm. Lumley's only published story, "The Diary of Alonzo Typer," appears in 1938 in "Weird Tales" magazine. It is set near Attica, NY, thirty miles east of Buffalo.

1938 -1945

One of the Third Reich's least-appreciated penchants is its search for legendary occult objects, including the Spear of Destiny, the Holy Grail, and the Ark of the Covenant. Sacred dates fit into the mix. Hitler dies on April 30, 1945 - May Eve/Walpurgisnacht.

1945

The only Masonic order of American origin, the Order of Quetzalcoatl is formed in Mexico City by Arthur J. Elian, an American World War II veteran.

1970s-1990s

Tourist disappearances along the Tex-Mex border spark rumors of a cult of witches recreating old Mesoamerican sacrificial rites.

1973

Speechless, sightless, tattered street people begin to be reported in many parts of the world.

1988

Serial murders break out in Rochester, NY, an exact century after Jack the Ripper's London season. A Rochester native, Francis Tumblety (1833?-1903), was one of the likeliest suspects to have been the original Ripper. The name on the family marker in Rochester's Holy Sepulchre Cemetery is strangely misspelled: "Tumuelty."

1994

A mysterious object is found near Victor, NY, at the preserved Seneca community and park today called Ganondagan. The object itself is spirited away, most likely to the nearest Seneca reservation, the Tonawanda, and the incident is quickly hushed. There are rumors that the item is an artifact and that it is composed of quartz crystal.

1995

A strangely-dressed, undernourished, middle-aged man is found along a country road in Clarence, NY, shot dead with a deer rifle from long range. Of Middle Eastern ancestry, he had been blind. His eyes had been burned or bored out sometime in his twenties. He was wearing a simple rag across his unusually-healed sockets.

1999

Under the pen-name Mason Winfield, Ward Courier, an independent-school English teacher and paranormal buff from Buffalo, NY, publishes "A Ghosthunter's Journal." The author considers the thirteen stories to be no more than fictional embellishments of local urban legends and witness accounts of paranormal events.

2002

A psychologist in Amherst, NY, interviews a patient with repressed memories of "The Whistlers," an order of blind, telepathic assassins.

2005

The Drug Enforcement Administration hears of a new substance making its appearance in the United States. Its nicknames include "savvy," "goo," "grey," and "know-know." Its unprecedented psychotropic effects include access to the deep corners of the mind and even the activation of ESP. Suspected of South American origin, its distribution hub seems to be in Buffalo, NY.

2006

The Federal Bureau of Investigation begins to trail a violent, high-stakes smuggling ring that deals in Native American antiquities.

2007

A crystal artifact, an anatomically perfect human jaw, turns up in central Ohio. Soon after it surfaces on the underground antiquities market, its vendors - three pothunters - are found dead.

2007

Law enforcement agencies in Buffalo, NY, begin a series of interviews with author Ward Courier about incidents that seem to be foreshadowed by the stories in his book, "A Ghosthunter's Journal."

2008

In pursuit of an antiquities ring led by a former American college professor, a team of American undercover agents comes upon a compound near San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato province. They find a number of bodies but no cult-leader.

2009

In Mexico's Chiapas province, a team of anthropologists reports the discovery of a perfect crystal skull with detachable jaw in a ruined city, then disappears. A team of American agents is sent after them.

2009

In Mexico's Chiapas province, an American agent comes upon a deserted estate replete with ancient statuary and a "tzompantli," an Aztec-style skull rack holding dozens of skulls. Most of them are at least decades old, but some have been recently-placed. The freshest heads appear to be those of the cultists who had maintained the rack. A surveillance video contains only one seemingly impossible clue to their killers.

2010

Anthropologists near Cayabamba, Peru, find a mass graveyard by a Moche temple at the foot of a mountain fifty miles inland from the Moche's traditional coastal home. They find an elite tomb near a ruined pyramid dedicated to an insectoid vampire-god.

The Present

In a mountain range along the Afghan-Pakistani border, a blind, ageless mystic, "The Old Man of the Mountain," sleeps in a pose of prayer that has lasted, they say, since the Crusades. Sometimes he laughs in his dreams, they say, as he surely did on September 11, 2001.